Herb Sutter Shares Perspectives on the New C++ Standard

Hi, I’m Charles Torre, Sr. Technographer with Channel 9. I’m back with an interview made last week with Herb Sutter, Principal Architect on the Visual C++ team at Microsoft and chairman of the ISO committee which recently approved the final technical changes to the C++0x standard – the publication of which is expected this summer. Go C++11!!! :-)

It’s always great to talk to Herb. In this specific conversation, it’s uplifting to see how excited Herb is for the future of one of the world’s most capable and widely used general purpose programming languages. C++ is a modern programming language for power and performance, but it’s also a highly abstracted general purpose language for building user mode applications, mobile apps, etc. The amazing part is how C++ can provide rich general programming abstractions and also ensure that your code can run at machine speeds. We talk about this, of course.

See below for the specific questions that were asked. You can simply click on a link to move directly to that point in the conversation. I do, however, strongly recommend that you watch the entire thing.

@Chris: Nothing was "cut out" as in removed due to some PR scrubbing…. My camera ran out of memory at that spot. I bolted on a re-take where we say farewell. (Also, there is more stuff in the retake that did not make it into the final piece as it was redundant – Herb already said it before "1995…".)

@Charles: is Facebook really the most official feedback channel for WP7? I'd never have guessed that.

Also, excellent interview, more of that, please. And since it was touched upon in the interview, I'd love to hear Herbs thoughts on concepts now, a while after they were cut, and everyone have had time to let it cool down a bit.

@jalf: glad you enjoyed it. We're planning more Herb interviews for sure. Like you, I'd love to hear his thoughts on concepts.

In terms of Facebook and product team feedback, well, we do live in the Facebook Age, don't we?… Also, I have been unable to track down a more classical approach to online feedback (like on the Microsoft Connect website…). I assume you don't want the WP7 team's twitter handle, right? :)